Wenchuan earthquake

I was in a meeting in our Chengdu office, 100k from the epicentre, when the Wenchuan earthquake hit. We immediately knew what it was..the building started shaking and people ran for the doors. I was trying to remember what you were meant to do in an earthquake. I remembered something about standing in a doorway or getting under a desk - but couldn't remember if that was for a earthquake or a tornado.

We started to evacuate the building. The ground was still shaking but you could walk without difficulty and, for no reason I can explain, I never thought the building was going to collapse. We were in a low rise - top floor of a 5 storey building. I walked out onto the roof terrace and looked across the city. Everything seemed ok - no columns of smoke, no signs of collapsed buildings - but the ground was still shaking - it had been at least 5 minutes by now. I walked down the emergency stairs to see the streets full of people. Everyone was very anxious - they were all trying to phone their families and no calls were going through. The shaking finally stopped.

All the buildings around us in the Chengdu hi-tech zone were still standing. We told the staff to go home and find their families. I went back into the office to collect my briefcase and someone dropped me off at the hotel, a few minutes away. But they weren't letting anyone in - they were worried about aftershocks - so I sat down on a bench in front of the lobby and fired up the laptop to see if I could get a wireless connection to the internet through the hotel. Stupid thing to do in hindsight..sitting in front of a 28 floor glass building waiting for a possible aftershock.

The BBC and CNN websites were showing the first news reports. Four reported dead. After about an hour it went up to 100. A crowd of young Chinese gathered round me and we looked at the news websites together. Still the hotel wouldn't let us in. They moved everyone to an outdoor garden a hundred metres away. They brought out tables and chairs and bottles of water. They were preparing for a long wait.

I sat down at a table with a couple of Americans in town on business and a Chinese couple who lived in Chengdu and had come to visit friends in the neighbourhood. They were waiting for the traffic to calm down before heading home. We chatted and exchanged stories. Their daughter was attending an international school and they were planning on her going to university in England. He brought some beers from his car and we talked and joked - me struggling in Mandarin and him in English.

By now there were at least 500 people in the garden. Some were playing cards, others eating and drinking. At the table next to us was a family in fluffy hotel bath robes - presumably enjoying a swim when the quake struck. Occasionally, the ground shook with a mild tremor. Everyone would stop and wait. It would pass and we would carry on. It was a bizarre situation. Sitting outside in the warm evening air, drinking beer, eating hotel-supplied pot noodles - there was a real buzz in the air that I can't explain. A mix of tension and excitement - after all we had experienced the earthquake, we were safe.

It would be at least 24 hours before the reports started coming out of Wenchuan and the true scale of the devastation and horrific loss of life started to become clear. While I had been sitting in that garden getting irritated that they wouldn't let us back into the hotel, tens of thousands had died in the mountains nearby.

I saw a map of the earthquake zone later that week on the BBC web site. The fault line ran northeast/southwest through the epicentre. Chengdu - a city of 10m people - was just 100kms to the west of the fault line. I realised then just how lucky I had been and, unbelievable as it was, how much worse this tragedy could have been.

Beijing noodles

Pulling noodles

Beijingers love their noodles and they don't come much better than at 'Noodle Loft' where the chefs pull, stretch and even slice individual noodle strands off a block using a single chopstick. My favourite are the short, wheat noodles with tomato and egg.
Stretching noodles

Slicing noodles

Building across the street II

Mid March

Mid May
Two months on and work progresses. The foundations are now dug and the concrete poured. Fleets of trucks line up at sunset to fill up with earth and take it off to some place where, presumably, they need earth.. The generators run through the night emitting a low buzz that is just loud enough to disturb your sleep. Rumour is that all building works will stop mid July for two months to reduce pollution during the Olympics which should bring some relief.

Legation Quarter

Built following the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, Beijing's Legation Quarter was established by foreign powers who forced the Qing government to accept the creation of a 'state-within-a-state'.

This 200 acre compound - just a kilometre or so south of the Forbidden City - was out of bounds to the Chinese and housed British, French, Russian and Japanese legations, amongst others, as well as banks, hotels and other trappings required to provide a home-from-home for the 500 or so foreign business and government personnel living there.

Today, because of its central location, much of the Legation Quarter has been taken over by Chinese government departments. The Supreme Court of China building is here as well as the office of the Major of Beijing. The original buildings can only be viewed at a distance through guarded gates. One of the remaining, accessible, buildings is St. Michael's church which still houses an active Christian community and opened at the end of 80's for regular services.

During our walk along the pleasant streets of the quarter, full of mature trees and gardens, we came across the Beijing Police Museum, a four storey building - originally the Bank of New York - tracing the history and heroics of Beijing's finest. Entry was a modest 5RMB (50€ cents), but for an additional 15RMB (1.5€) you got a smiling policeman key ring, a lapel badge and a go at the police laser shooting range - a full Dirty Harry experience with video clips of villains jumping out from behind buildings and firing at you. This was a opportunity we couldn't miss!

Are you feeling lucky, punk?

Beijing urban planning

Model of Olympic centre
Just south of Tian'anmen Square is Beijing's four storey Museum of Urban Planning. Here you can see what Beijing looked like in the past and what it should look like in the future. Highlight of the numerous exhibits is undoubtedly the huge model of the city - a patchwork of satellite photos mixed with scale models of town sections.

Walking through extensive exhibits covering the preservation plans for Beijing's hutongs (alley ways that made up the old Beijing) and traditional architecture, a visitor might be forgiven for thinking that Beijing urban planning is sensitive to the city's past, but they'd be wrong. Urban planning in Beijing has been driven by a passion & drive for rapid modernisation on one hand and, unfortunately, greed on the other. Real estate development has created vast fortunes in China over the last 10 years and it is no coincidence that that the country's 'rich list' is dominated by real estate moguls. And not much gets in the way of property developers and their projects - including city officials. Only last month Zhou Lianglio, former head of Haidan district in Beijing, & his wife were convicted of accepting more than $4M in bribes from real estate developers in the city over the last few years.

Only time will tell whether the noble intentions espoused in the museum for Beijing's city planning will match the realities on the ground.

Tac standing on the corner of Donzhimenwai Dajie

Want a pedicab tour?

A slow afternoon outside the Beijing Drum Tower as an army of pedicab drivers wait to take tourists for a ride around Houhai lake and the adjoining hutongs.

Beijing's underground city

Built in the early 70's, at the all-time low point of Sino-Russian relationships, this underground web of tunnels and bomb shelters beneath Beijing was meant to house up to 40% of the city's population in case of Soviet attack (the rest would be evacuated to mountains outside of the city).

It's not clear how much of this 'city' sitting 10m underground and, apparently, covering more than 85sq km still remains intact given the relentless build out of high rises and the expansion of the Beijing subway system over the last 20 years - but you can still visit parts of it. We went to the only entrance officially open to the public - southwest of Tienanmen Square - but more than 90 entrances were said to have existed around the city.

The walls are covered with camouflage netting, Mao slogans, inspirational photos and useful instructions on how to put on a gas mask. Side passages led to "old persons exercise room", "children's dormitory" and "reading room". Bizarrely, after 20 minutes walk through the labyrinth we ended up in an underground silk shop complete with sales assistants ready to sell us the usual tourist trinkets. In China, nobody likes to miss an opportunity to eat or shop.